Experts may disagree on many things in the web world of advertising but it’s clear that for most tourism marketers, content is the most important digital marketing tactic in the last few years. Content is what google sees and uses to help provide a search result that is as meaningful as possible to searchers. Content is also how you get your brand name out (and hopefully remembered). And for the most part, people agree on that. Content gets shared.
A Content Marketing Strategy Is Critical
In a recent survey by Smart Insights on digital marketing trends in 2015, content marketing ranked as the top priority (click image to see bigger view)
Published in an article in on-tourismreview.com they report ” one should not expect to maintain the currency and competitiveness of their travel SEO strategy by just generating original content. Having good content is important, everybody knows that by now. How you generate, post, and distribute it in the long term — as well as being intentional with your marketing strategy — are the factors that will set you apart from the crowd.
Critical points that every content marketing strategy should adhere to are the following:
Do your research well, connecting your topics to long-tail keywords that indicate low competition as well as high search volume. Your content, travel articles, infographics, press releases, videos, etc. should be engaging so that it can fit in among top-ranked tourism industry media.”
This is echoed by articles in industry leading marketing blog sites like Hubspot and by SEO consultants like yoast.com
You need to create a body of content that grows around key subjects that you want to be known for and that aligns with your brand.
Content Is More than Text – What Gets Shared Most?
In researching this subject I came across some interesting bits. First, in a previous story I reviewed what Hubspot said about frequency and depth of content. They came up with a metric that worked for them and how they incorporated the knowledge into their strategy.
I also found an excellent summary of a study done by Huffington Post in an article called Why Content Goes Viral : What analyzing 100 million articles taught us. The article provides a lot of insight into the most successful tactics for what content works best. It can feel cheesy if you are the content author sometimes because you knowingly create content around these types of subjects to get opens and shares. But creating great prose is secondary to creating sales in the commercial world. Once you recognise the pattern, you will see just how much of what you read or are tempted to open, uses one of these tactics below. (What’s this post’s title?)
Another key idea in the article is to make your content work harder by reposting it, more than once. Not surprisingly content shares drop off dramatically after 2 days. I’ve noticed the same thing with newsletters. Two days provides about 90% of all reads or opens trailing off rapidly. But, reposting drives new views and shares. An interesting observation is made showing a post on Facebook made by Evernote that had 23 shares after one week and then was reposted 11 days later and shot up to 181 shares. 
If you are interested you can download the list, Top 10 Reasons “Why Content Goes Viral: What analysing 100 million articles taught us”, by Noah Hagen.
By the way, for list makers 10 is the best number to have.
You can read this full article on the Huffington Post here. I highly recommend it.